


Love was a lunatic city

by lbmisscharlie



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Coping, F/M, Facial Hair, Infidelity, M/M, No Dialogue, Post-Reichenbach, Prompt Fic, john's moustache
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-14
Updated: 2013-09-14
Packaged: 2017-12-26 13:01:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/966221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lbmisscharlie/pseuds/lbmisscharlie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock doesn’t kiss John again, but his eyes fall to his mouth – to his moustache – and then away, before he pulls his hand out from John’s trousers and wipes it against the brick wall behind them and walks away with more poise than he should, by any rights, have. John wipes his mouth; his thumb strokes over the short, bristled hairs and he thinks of Mary, guiltily, for the first time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love was a lunatic city

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mishima](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mishima/gifts).



> This was written for my follow prompt fest over at tumblr, for fellow John's-moustache-lover, [johnstached](http://johnstached.tumblr.com), who gave me the wonderful [prompt](http://lbmisscharlie.tumblr.com/post/60672466446/oh-my-god-of-course-this-would-be-the-prompt): _Maybe John asking Sherlock to shave his 'stache (oh the pain!) and that's how Sherlock knows he's been forgiven._
> 
> Title is from Pablo Neruda's love sonnet LXXI:  
>  _we wanted to build a strong nest_  
>  _with our own hands, without hurt or harm or speech_  
>  _but love was not like that: love was a lunatic city_

When John reaches the top of the stairs, Sherlock has paused on the landing, in front of the door; his hand is at the doorknob, and he looks at John expectantly – nervously. It’s shockingly – maddeningly – like the first time, the only hint of politeness John saw coming from the man in the first weeks he knew him, and it appearing only because he was curious about John’s limp. 

John steps forward, no cane this time, and Sherlock nods and twists the handle. Inside, 221b has the painful air of a little-visited museum: dusty, thin. Everything is just as it was when he finally – when he couldn’t stay, not a moment longer, and fled for the dubious comfort of a bedsit in Lambeth, leaving Mycroft and Mrs Hudson to sort the flat.

This, apparently, is their idea of _taking care of it_. John’s fingertips tingle; he tightens his hand into a fist then deliberately releases it, one finger then the next. Sherlock is pleased, he knows, to have him here, to have him _back_ , so he works a smile onto his lips and makes them both tea.

The next weeks are – well. They’re quick, dashing moments of adrenaline pumping, of shared grins and paired footsteps as they score their paths anew across the tangled map of London; they’re tea and toast for John and a plate set at Sherlock’s elbow; they’re the razor-edged, bewildering moments when John’s veins turn icy, forgetting that it’s not last year, or the one before that, forgetting that Sherlock isn’t dead and buried. They’re John’s breath, knocked out of him by the twisted wail of a violin, by the acrid smell of smoke from an erstwhile experiment, by Sherlock’s gloves on the table, soft from use and still warm from his hands.

(Could he imagine all of that? Is his mind that cruel?)

Most of all, though, their next weeks, the first few dozen days of Sherlock’s renewed life, are marked by John re-learning the weight of Sherlock’s gaze, which follows him more intently, more hungrily, than John ever remembered: eyes on his gait, his clenched fists, his sore shoulder, his uneasy mouth.

His moustache, which he’d grown after he met Mary, when the gauntness of his cheeks finally began to fill out. She likes it; thinks he looks distinguished, and likes to stroke the tips of her fingers down it and kiss, just above his mouth, to press the hairs between his skin and her lips. 

Sherlock doesn’t say anything about it, not with words, but his gaze flicker-falls on it too often for coincidence. 

Mary thinks Baker Street is delightful, runs her fingers over the mantle and pets the side of the skull, raises one eyebrow to John over the open refrigerator door, takes John to bed in his cozy upstairs room and stays curled around him, body pale in the weak square of light from the window. Sherlock’s eyes flicker over her, before falling back to John: watching John watch Mary. When John turns his head, Sherlock doesn’t look away.

Sherlock, of course, expects to saunter right back into New Scotland Yard and take on a case the moment he comes back from the dead. Lestrade throws them out of his office with a few unkind words as to Sherlock’s sanity, then wrenches open the door Sherlock had slammed behind him, strides up, and gives Sherlock a brief, tight hug.

It takes Sherlock two weeks to clear his name; he texts Lestrade when he’s finished and they’re on a crime scene within the half hour. Then they’re running after a criminal, and John is tackling him, and Sherlock is grinning down at him, knees on the pavement of a grimy alley and the murderer pinned between his thighs. Lestrade leads the man to a panda car with rueful thanks, and, once they’re alone, Sherlock presses his forearm across John’s collarbone and shoves him up against the wall.

John shivers, and wonders when the fight went out of him where Sherlock is concerned, and doesn’t have to wait long before Sherlock’s mouth is on his, desperate and scrambling, and his hand is at John’s belt, then shoving inside his pants.

John gasps, Sherlock’s teeth against his tongue, and twists his hands into the waistband of Sherlock’s trousers, pulling him closer until Sherlock ruts against John’s thigh in time with his hand on John’s cock. It’s familiar, so very like it had been, those few times before, and John comes painfully – shamefully – quickly, spilling over Sherlock’s fisted hand, and Sherlock follows, falling against him, limp.

He doesn’t kiss John again, but his eyes fall to his mouth – to his moustache – and then away, before he pulls his hand out from John’s trousers and wipes it against the brick wall behind them and walks away with more poise than he should, by any rights, have. John wipes his mouth; his thumb strokes over the short, bristled hairs and he thinks of Mary, guiltily, for the first time.

It doesn’t happen again, not for two weeks, and John thinks to himself that if he were a good person, he would break things off with Mary. Instead, he takes her out to a dinner that’s interrupted by Sherlock before the entrees arrive. He starts to apologize, but she just grins, and asks Sherlock about the crime, and comes with them to the scene where she talks amiably with Sally and Lestrade and doesn’t cower at the sight of blood.

They drop Mary at hers and go back to Baker Street together, where John sits in his chair to make some notes about the case while they’re fresh in his mind, and Sherlock perches on his, steeples his hands, and closes his eyes. John doesn’t notice that he’s opened them again until he looks up, thinking to ask Sherlock about a point he’s not clear on, and notices Sherlock’s gaze intent upon him.

No – upon his hand, propped under his chin while his thumb strokes absently at his moustache.

John drops his hand, startled by the guilt that washes over him, and licks at his lips nervously. Standing – unfolding himself from the chair with one great, crane-like movement – Sherlock brushes past him and goes to his room, the door closing with finality behind him.

John stays at Mary’s for the next two nights, until she tells him to stop being a coward and go home.

The air is quiet, empty, when he returns, and his heart leaps somewhere up to his throat; he pushes through the kitchen, shoving a bar chair out of the way as he passes. It clatters to the ground, but he ignores it, wrenching open Sherlock’s door and stumbling in and – oh. 

Sherlock is breathing hard, wild-eyed, his hands clenching the bedsheets as he clamors into a seated position. He’d only been sleeping. He stares, hard, at John for a long moment before his gaze goes steady, and he can exhale and look away. Backing out of the room, John shuts the door behind him; he sits in his armchair with his head in his hands until Sherlock finally comes out.

They eat dinner at Angelo’s that night, and John kisses Sherlock on the landing outside their door, once and then again before Sherlock kisses him back. 

++

John wakes with the light, its shifting westerly gaze unfamiliar, strange, to his morning body. It takes a few long moments – blinking against the filtered sunlight; shifting on fabric smooth and warm – before he snaps, quite suddenly, into himself and realizes. Sherlock’s room – Sherlock’s _bed_ : not the east-facing room upstairs, not his squalid garden-level bedsit, not Mary’s warm, velvet-curtained loft. He breathes in. Breathes out.

The bed is quite empty but for John, no shifting warmth beside him, but that is little comfort to his treacherous heart, which beats fleetingly against his ribs, against his sternum, against the too-tight chambers of his lungs. 

It seems a moment for decisions, for finalities, here staring up at a ceiling not his own, nor that which he and Mary talked of sharing. He can summon no such certitude, though; the sureness of his actions extends to planting his feet on the floor, struggling into a tee-shirt, and walking to the kitchen, no more. 

Sherlock is on the sofa, fully dressed, and he looks at John then looks away. John puts the kettle on.

The water’s boiled, the kettle clicked off, before John looks up again, startled, and stares at the empty mug he’d set on the counter. He blinks at it before remembering that, yes, teabags are in the cupboard; where they’ve always been, since John put them there the week he moved in and told Sherlock he didn’t care about the eyeballs in the microwave, but to leave his damned tea alone. The box is battered, mostly empty; he takes one sachet and drops it in the mug. The water, poured over it, blooms amber, then soaks to brown. 

John drinks it, too hot, standing over the counter, and wonders if he should leave. If he can leave. 

++

It would be easier, certainly, if Mary could look at him and know; if Sherlock had left traces of himself behind, clues for her to follow. Instead she kisses him, off center and fond, and asks after Sherlock. 

And John – John is cowardly. He talks about how Sherlock still doesn’t sleep at proper times, and not about the way he’d blinked at John, sated and lazy and quiet with his face half-obscured by the pillow; about the stack of books on cold cases piled up on every flat surface in the sitting room, but not about the tight curl of Sherlock’s fingers around his wrist, around his cock. He sips at his coffee, though he can’t taste it, and doesn’t say anything of importance at all.

Mary reaches across the table, cupping her fingers under his chin, and touches her thumb to the hairs of his moustache, like she’s dabbing away foam. She lets her thumb linger there, leaving an impression, before pulling it away slowly and letting her hand drop to the empty space on the table between them.

John’s breath burns guiltily, heaving down his esophagus with what must be visible effort. He looks at Mary; she looks away. He starts to say something, to explain, and that’s when he realizes that yes, she does know; how can she not?

Mary leaves first. He has a few things at her place, a duffle’s worth only, really, for he had little to start with, having left all but necessities at Baker Street, the rest too imbued with – thought, memory. With Sherlock’s searching gaze and prying fingers. She’ll drop it off, she says, and he doesn’t argue.

He doesn’t go back – home – after, but wanders; each street seems imprinted with Sherlock’s footsteps, his knowing glance, the memory of his hand, reaching back in the darkness to John.

His presence is solid, substantial, though he’s not there: a lurking presence that has dogged the corners of John’s eyes since long before Sherlock’s death, and through his long absence. Familiar, if not comforting. John stands in the middle of Trafalgar Square and remembers taking the steps in long strides to keep up with Sherlock. 

++

He takes the stairs two at a time, finds Sherlock sulking on the sofa, pulls him up with both hands, and leads him to the bathroom, where he fumbles in the medicine cabinet to shove a razor into Sherlock’s hands. Sherlock looks at it – stares, really – for far too long, then inhales, sharply, and jerks his chin up to stare instead at John.

Sherlock’s hands are open, spread in the air in front of him; the plastic razor rests in one palm like a relic, a sacred object. John nods, and Sherlock surges forward and kisses him, hard and desperate, teeth clashing too-hard against John’s and lips pressed to the bristly edges of John’s moustache. 

John owns an electric razor, and buys disposable two-blade Gillettes and Boots-own-brand shaving crème; none of which, apparently, meets Sherlock’s approval. He leaves John in the bathroom – John drops to the toilet lid, where his hands sweat, clutched at his sides – to rummage around his closet. John can just see him through the bathroom door, the tangle of his hair appearing-disappearing over the horizon of his mattress as he kneels and pulls out boxes. 

He comes back with a battered leather case, about the breadth of his two hands together, which he places with some care on the edge of the sink and creaks open. It contains just what John expects, and though he worries that the blade will be dulled, rusted with time, when Sherlock flicks it open it gleams. 

Sherlock’s shaving soap is a hard little block tucked in a dented tin and it smells tart and citrus-sharp when he lathers it, the process remarkably old-fashioned for Sherlock’s modern edges, for his giddy embrace of new technology. It foams, gently, on the bristles of the brush; John watches the lather for he can’t watch Sherlock’s hands, tracks the soap-touched brush as Sherlock brings it up, closer, and dabs it along John’s upper lip.

John doesn’t startle when Sherlock places the tips of two fingers, lightly, underneath his chin, but his breath catches, inhales sharply, and his eyes flick up to Sherlock’s, which watch him with a sharp-edged avarice. The foam of the soap slides down the corner of his lip; Sherlock swipes it away with one lingering thumb, and John has to bite down his jaw, tight, to keep from turning his head, taking Sherlock’s thumb in his mouth. 

Lifting his thumb away with a curious gaze, Sherlock turns John’s head for him, steering him with the light touch of his fingertips on the soft underside of John’s chin, and soaps his cheeks, first one then the other, tilting John’s head, his jaw this way and that, to cover the light stubble. 

The blade he strops, quickly and with long, precise strokes, examining it with one eye squinting in the light before determining it prepared. John reminds himself to breathe – _breathe_ – and lifts his chin at the bump of Sherlock’s fingertips underneath it. Bringing the blade up, Sherlock hesitates for a moment only, hand hovering next to John’s jawline while he determines the angle, then touches it to John’s skin, skates it firmly down and wipes it clean.

Sherlock’s expression is tight, intent, familiar from so many cases, so many crime scenes: searching, evaluating, sharp as the blade that drags down John’s cheekbone, across the crest of his chin. He shaves everything but the moustache first, tender and steady up John’s neck, the softness under his chin, then pauses. The edges of his teeth just show, biting at his lower lip, and the razor hovers just in John’s periphery. 

John nods; Sherlock closes his eyes, breathes deep, chest rising then falling, then opens his eyes and tucks the blade just below John’s nose and pulls down. Five stark, bare stripes, then up and across, and Sherlock is rubbing his thumb across John’s philtrum, swiping away the foam. It catches in the curve of his lip, and John has to bite down, hard, jaw flexing, against the sudden, unexpected, intimacy of Sherlock’s skin on his. 

Sherlock, though, senses his jaw shifting and presses harder, thumbprint to the newly-bared skin, damp and hot; even when he lifts it away, drags his thumb across John’s lower lip, John feels it, pressing there, marking his skin. His eyes flick, finally, up to Sherlock’s, which meet his intently, fractured and desperate. 

With another great breath, Sherlock wrenches his gaze away, cleaning and closing the razor with neat, precise movements. John scrapes his hands over his thighs, wiping away their clenched sweat on his jeans, and stands; his leg wavers, just for a moment, and Sherlock’s hands still, but John takes a deep breath and steadies it. He places his hand at Sherlock’s hip, a question and a promise, so Sherlock settles the blade back into his case, snaps it closed, and circles his fingers around John’s wrist to lead him away.


End file.
